Political Cartel

Everybody has heard stories of plaintiffs winning tort suits that sound outrageously stupid. These come in the form of chain e-mails, blog posts, and urban legends; however, most of these stories are completely ficticious. I heard one earlier today about a person who attempted suicide by standing on train tracks and the sued the railroad for medical expenses when the attempt failed. Have you heard any of these before?

• A mother won $780,000 from suing a furniture store after she tripped over her own rambunxious toddler and broke her ankle.
• A man won $74,000 plus medical expenses for suing his neighbor who ran over his hand while he was trying to steal hubcaps off of his car.
• A robber sued the owners of a home he was burglarizing after he trapped himself in the garage and suffered emotional distress.
• A woman won $113,000 from a restaurant after she slipped on a spilled drink that she had just spilled on the floor.

These and many more are utter fabrications. Perhaps some of these stories are deliberately created to support a tort reform agenda by interested parties. Maybe others just make funny stories at first, but they are passed on like in the game of telephone and eventually people start to think they might be true. Urban legends and tall tales often have fascinating origins, but the important thing to remember is that they are not, in fact, true.

Even if there are some true stories of tort abuses out there, they are evidently very few and far between. This makes sense logically because there are so many checks in our legal system to weed out frivolous lawsuits and prevent plaintiffs from winning money for silly claims. The first check is the plaintiffs themselves; uneducated, poor, and stupid individuals are unlikely to have ready access to legal counsel and they are unlikely to even consider using the legal system to fix their problems. The second check is the potential attorney; attorneys are concerned about their money and reputation, two things that are lost if they take on clients with unfounded claims and press frivolous lawsuits. The third check is the judge; judges can easily grant motions to dismiss cases that are obviously frivolous, and they have a very strong incentive to do so so they can save their own time and preserve their reputation in the legal community. The fourth check is a jury if the case does, in fact, go to trial; juries are made up of somewhat normal people, and are unlikely to award large amounts of money for obviously absurd reasons. The last check is the appeals process; even if all the previous checks fail to prevent a frivolous lawsuit from getting through, we have an extensive appeals process that allows new courts to hear the arguments and overturn what the original trial court decided.

Tort reform involves more issues than just these outrageous stories, but it is a major problem that many people think these stories are true. The overall issue of tort reform probably deserves its own blog post someday, but here are some thoughts on the issue. We have to give a lot of credit to our legal system for its extensive checks and balances and its long history of providing reliable justice in most circumstances. For every handful of crazy stories that we hear, most of them turn out to be false, and even the one or two that might be true are still vastly outweighed by the thousands of cases that are rightly decided or rightly dismissed by our proven system.

I don’t want to preclude the possibility that there are some ridiculous examples of juries awarding huge amounts of money for completely frivolous reasons. I just haven’t seen very many of those examples. Feel free to comment with some examples if you have any, but just passing along rumors or chain-email information won’t be good enough. This is the internet, and you should be able to find some legitimate links to document it if the case really happened.